Rookie running back Glen Coffee (29) of the San Fracisco 49ers carries the ball during training camp held at the 49ers Training Facility in Santa Clara, Calif. on Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009.

Rookie running back Glen Coffee (29) of the San Fracisco 49ers carries the ball during training camp held at the 49ers Training Facility in Santa Clara, Calif. on Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009.

Photo: Stephen Lam, The Chronicle

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To heckle is to love, in Singletary's world

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Alex Smith was booed on his second throw of his first practice of the 49ers' training camp. Booed by roughly 1,000 of the most devoted 49ers fans in existence. And best of all for those of you who like your football with a little bit of "what the hell?" - booed with the eager approval of head coach Mike Singletary.

Yes, it's a new episode of Big Mikey's magnum opus, "Creative Tension in the Modern NFL: Why Positive Reinforcement Is for Candypants Sissy-Marys."

Now before you get too involved in the dynamic here, understand that it was the first day of training camp. Understand, too, that Smith is no worse off this morning than he was Saturday morning. And understand that the fans booed him with love, since they know they might need to boo Shaun Hill later for the right to boo Smith again in the regular season.

But most of all, understand that Singletary wants all the abuse you can muster to be directed at his team. He likes his players on edge, which must be why he wastes so few compliments on them, why he is so quick to quantify the amount of suckage he sees in any given practice, and why he spent almost 20 minutes of the team's 2-hour, 12-minute morning workout talking to them as a group about this shortcoming and that. The man loves to talk, no question.

In short, his morale officer is a tall guy with a hoodie and a scythe.

"I think it's outstanding," the head coach said of the booing, choking down a gleeful cackle. "Alex has to learn how to deal with them. That's what they're here for, the fans."

Singletary isn't trying to get fans to boo Smith back into his shell. In fact, he's trying to speed along the deconstruction process for the entire team, under the seemingly bizarre notion that the players harbor delusions of greatness. "You don't want them to get a false sense of security," he said after savaging their first workout as wholly unacceptable.

Singletary apparently has decided that the 49ers have grown soft from losing two of every three games since 2003, an odd notion by any measure. Strangely, the Raiders of all people have chosen the opposite tack. They want to be more cerebral, or at the very least less dim.

The 49ers have come out in full pads from the start, hitting, colliding, running "nutcracker" drills (the only thing about the practice that didn't seem to offend Singletary's sensibilities). The Raiders, on the other hand, are starting with four consecutive two-a-day practices in which the players are in shells, learning formations, and running plays in which the whistle to stop a play blows a second after the ball is snapped.

Years of hideous penalties, blown assignments, inattention to detail and general all-around slovenliness clearly have taken their toll on Al Davis' psyche. The Raiders are in camp and being drilled academically. The 49ers are in camp being drilled physically, with a side order of snarl.

So much, then, for the old stereotypes.

The Raiders, we get. The litany of on-field mistakes is so thick these past six years that it had become a defining trait of a corroding operation. And they were not errors of commission - trying too hard - but of omission - forgetting assignments, getting lazy on snap counts, trying to shave rules to overcome physical deficiencies, and, in some cases, not caring enough to pay attention. As odd as the Davis/Tom Cable methodology might be, they/he has as a defense the idea that this training camp must addresses the team's persistent bursts of stupid.

Singletary, on the other hand, knows only this way, growing as he did in the Ditka-Bears philosophy that football is first and foremost a matter of tough-mindedness. He sees the team's culture as one of finesse and misdirection, based on a general unwillingness to engage the opponent physically. In an era where teams expend much energy working on players' senses of entitlement and self-esteem, Singletary seems eager to strip them of both.

It is why he goes out of his way to remind us how far they are from the league's elite teams. It is preprogramming at its most relentless - "We're not good enough, we're not good enough, we're not good enough," until the players decide to fight back and show that they are.

The risk here is obvious. A slow start means that the message turns from instructive to wearying, and players will turn off a coach who becomes tedious. See Nolan, Mike, for the fruits of that lesson. Singletary's game has a time limit, one he seemed to have set Saturday at the end of a parable.

This "is a team that wants to win, but they're not quite sure of the price that has to be paid in order to get it," he said. "It's like a kid who is a little bit naive about how much something costs. He says, 'Well I want one of those.' And mom and dad may look at him and say, 'We don't have enough money for that.'

"I want our guys to understand we have all the money we need. We can buy anything we want. But we have to be willing to pay the price to get it, and that price, it's a high one. I think our guys are willing to do that, but I'll know by mid-training camp."

That's in three weeks, Aug. 21, give or take a lecture. That's a lot of booing, kids. Hope you're up to it.